Question: Today people are travelling more than ever before. It is better to repeat the word, than force a synonym into your essay that is incorrect. If you are not 100% sure about the grammar and meaning of the word, don’t try to force it. It would have been better for this student to have used simpler words and phrases or just have copied the word. ‘Audio-visual’ might sound like high-level vocabulary, but you would never refer to ‘video games’ in this way. ‘Fierce’ does not mean the same things as ‘violent’. ‘Young ones’ does not really mean teenagers and would never be used by a native speaker in an academic essay. They have also used the wrong form of ‘violence’. ‘Crime’ means all crime and ‘acts of violence’ is specifically violent crime. they are more worried about using synonyms than writing a sentence that is clear and correct. These are all wrong and are typical of a student who feels like they must use synonyms and will use them at any cost i.e. This student has changed the following words: Paraphrase: The rise of acts of violent in young ones are often viewed as being caused by the exposure to fierce audio-visual games. Question: The growth in crime among teenagers can be attributed to an increase in the use of violent video games. If you are not sure they are 100% the same, don’t use them. The lesson to take away from this example is only use synonyms you know are 100% the same. The person who wrote this answer went on to mention ‘extracurricular activities’ several times in the rest of her essay and this meant she got a much lower score because she was talking about irrelevant ideas.įinally, ‘traditional’ and ‘serious’ are very loose synonyms so loose I would not really recognise them as synonyms at all. The question is focusing on young children and by using young people, you are talking about an irrelevant age group.Īnother example is ‘extracurricular activities’, which means things you do outside of school, whereas the question relates to school subjects. This leads to you writing unrelated ideas and this can lower the score of your whole essay.įor instance, ‘young children’ could mean people between the ages of around 1-10, but ‘young people’ can mean anything from 1-30 years of age. These are words that don’t really mean the same as each other and the result is that you are writing about something completely different from the question. The problem that this student has is they are using what I call ‘loose synonyms’. This student has changed the following words using synonyms, but not all are correct:Īrt, drama and music- extracurricular activities Paraphrase: It is important that young people are taught extracurricular activities, alongside serious subjects like mathematics, biology and chemistry. Question: It is important that young children are taught art, drama and music, alongside more traditional subjects like maths and science. I do not encourage students to use synonyms that mean ‘nearly the same’ because it often leads to mistakes. When using a synonym we first need to think about the meaning. The dangerous thing about synonyms is that people use them incorrectly or try too hard and force them into their essays. If you repeat the same keywords many times, it indicates to the examiner that you don’t know any other ways of expressing those words and that you have a narrow vocabulary. Click the link above for more information on paraphrasing.įinally, we can use synonyms to show the examiner that we have a wide-ranging vocabulary. We should also paraphrase the question in our very first sentence when answering an IELTS Writing task and synonyms are one of the key ways of doing this. We could use the words ‘I.T.’, ‘laptops’ or ‘iPads’ instead of just repeating the word ‘computers’ over and over again. Do you agree?’ we would have to use the words ‘computers’ and ‘education’ many times in our answer. So to make our writing sound better we use synonyms.įor example, if the question asked us ‘Computers are being used more and more in education. When we get an IELTS Writing Task there will be certain keywords in the question and our writing would sound very repetitive if we simply wrote the same words over and over again. This article will look at some real essays that used synonyms incorrectly to show you how dangerous they can be. However, synonyms are also very dangerous because if used incorrectly, it can not only lower your mark for vocabulary, but also for task response, and coherence. Synonyms help us to vary our language and show the examiner that we have a wide-ranging vocabulary. Lots of IELTS teachers, myself included, stress the importance of using synonyms in your writing. Synonyms are different words that have exactly the same or nearly the same meaning, such as male and man or third-level education and university.
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